The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (70 page)

1–VHE noted in her diary, 9 July: ‘Wonderful day with Mary. Started in boat 9.30 … sailed to Hayling. Landed at a perfect beach, had lunch, and I bathed. Mary told me her life, she was delightful’ (Bodleian).

2–‘Tradition … involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year’ (‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ [I],
Egoist
6, Sept. 1919; SW).

MS
Beinecke

11 July 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr Jepson,

We should have loved to come on Sunday, but unfortunately I have promised to go down to Oxfordshire for the weekend.
¹
I do hope you will ask us again later – also the day and the hour suit us beautifully.

With kindest regards to Mrs Jepson and yourself.

Sincerely,
T. S. Eliot

I should be very much interested to have your candid opinion of my verse in the current
Art & Letters.
If you don’t see that publication I will send you typed copies.

1–TSE was to spend the weekend of 12–13 July with OM at Garsington.

MS
BL

16 July 1919

18 Crawford Mansions

Dear Mr Schiff,

I ought to have written to you long ago, but I have simply felt too ill to do any writing. This is merely to thank you for your letter, and for your great kindness in analysing my poem [the unpublished ‘Gerontion’] so carefully. I wish this letter was able to reciprocate – I can just say a few words before we meet. When I wrote last I had not even begun
Richard Kurt,
¹
so your fears were unfounded. Now I have read it once, and with great interest, and hope to have time to go over part of it again before we meet. Here,
I
am an outsider, and am timid of any judgements I make. I read with sustained interest a book which seemed to me a very accurate study of a
monde
which is almost unknown to me. There are points about it which I hope you will clear up for me, but I don’t think in any case that I shall make any criticism more severe than this: that it seemed to me that the canvas was more crowded with events and people than was essential to the effects. Though, as I say, there was
no
moment of boredom for me.

If it is possible for me to get away in time, we should like very much to come down by the 5.20 train [to Eastbourne] Friday afternoon. (The ballet is postponed until next week). I hope this will suit you – it seems odd of me perhaps to ask to come earlier, at such late notice – but we should like to come!

I will let you know of course if I can’t come by this train, but I am practically certain.

We are looking forward to seeing you and Mrs Schiff very keenly.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–Stephen Hudson,
Richard Kurt
(1919), the first in SS’s sequence of autobiographical novels.

MS
Texas

Wed. [16 July 1919] Flat

[18 Crawford Mansions]

Mary dear

Thank you for letter. This week has been – is – a horrid muddle and disappointment. We were going to the Ballet with the Sitwells on Friday,
and I hoped to see you. Now they say that the new one is postponed until
Tuesday
– so we are going with them that night.
¹
Will you be there? Surely you need not go back, or else you can come up again?
I
wanted to go to the Ballet tonight but Tom is
IM
possible – full of nerves, really not well, very bad cough, very morbid and grumpy. I wish you had him! So we are to go to the Schiffs on Friday evening instead of Saturday morning, (for the weekend). This is entirely Tom altho’ I don’t expect you to credit it – As things are I can’t do anything about the Bank holiday weekend with you. The money trouble is always cropping up, and it is very bad for him to think we are spending too much. V. bad for his work, or for any man’s work I suppose. He gets entangled into going to places he does not really want to, or enjoy, and then has to sacrifice the nice things. He gets angry and stubborn. Mary dear the photographs will not be ready for a fortnight. I can’t bear to wait so long. I did write to O. M. exactly what I told you I should, and I put it
most
sensibly and friendlily and with all due regard to her hothouse feelings. And behold, she is furious with me! I am cast into outer darkness, so I can join you there.

Absurd creature!

I feel rather uncomfortable writing to Gordon Sq. Please keep my letter to yourself!
²

Our ‘day’
was
wonderful – I have such an admiration for you Mary. You are all that [I] admire, and I consider it is flattering to me that I admire you so! You are such a ‘
civilised
’ rebel.

Jack is coming to dinner tomorrow. I shall kiss him.

[unsigned]

1–Premiere of the Ballets Russes production (22 July) of Falla’s
The Three-Cornered Hat,
conducted by Ernst Ansermet, with choreography by Massine (who also danced the role of the Miller), and with curtains, sets and costumes by Picasso. VHE wrote in her diary: ‘Went to ballet with Sachie [Sitwell] & party … Very interesting & the music very good. Massine really wonderful. But on the whole nothing like the
Boutique Fantastique.
Saw Mary, Clive, Jack, Ottoline (with the Duke), Read, Aldington, Viola, Nina etc. etc. Did not feel well & looked horrible.’ TSE also went the following evening with the Hutchinsons to see
The Three-Cornered Hat
for a second time, as well as
Papillons
and
Prince
Igor
.

2–Clive Bell, MH’s lover, lived at 46 Gordon Square.

MS
Houghton

18 July 1919

Authors’ Club,
2 Whitehall Court,
S.W.1

Dear Eliot,

I have several times recently felt impelled to write you my admiration for your critical articles and put it off in the hope of meeting you. Your article in the current
Egoist
²
again stird my admiration and (I admit) my envy. You have a power of apprehension, of analysis, of the dissociation of ideas,
³
with a humour and ease of expression which make you not the best but the only modern writer of prose criticism in English. I read your essays in the
Athenaeum
with the greatest pleasure; I hope that some day you will collect these and other essays into book form.

Having said this much, with complete sincerity, I feel compelled to add that I dislike your poetry very much; it is over-intellectual and afraid of those essential emotions which make poetry.
⁴

Excuse the impertinence of all this and its rather heavy style, due to a sort of pious terror.

Yrs
Richard Aldington

1–Richard Aldington, author and critic: see Glossary of Names.

2–TSE, ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ [IV],
Egoist 6: 5
(July 1919), 39–40.

3–See TSE, ‘Marivaux’: ‘Critics are impersonal people, engaged usefully in dissociating ideas’ (
Arts & Letters
2: 1, Spring 1919).

4–RA wrote later: ‘Mr. Eliot’s poetry is often attacked as incomprehensible and heartless, which is simply another way of saying that it is subtle and not sentimental’ (‘The Poetry of T. S. Eliot’,
Outlook
49, July 1922).

MS
BL

21 July 1919 18

Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St, w.1

Dear Violet,

I must write to tell you how thoroughly we both enjoyed our holiday with you
²
– but I believe Vivien is writing too so I will merely speak for myself. Incidentally, I feel much better for it. I was really glad of the bad
weather as it gave excuse for more conversation – there are very few people to whom one could say that sincerely!

I am very glad you are going to be at Eastbourne when Vivien is there, but I hope you will be in London for a time before you leave the country, so that I can see something of you.

I send the poem back, – as I said, I don’t want anyone to see it but yourselves.

By the way, John put a
Napoleon
³
into my bag by mistake. I noticed another copy, so I hope you won’t mind if I keep it a few days in the hope of being able to look at it. I will post it back carefully.

With best wishes to both of you.

Sincerely yours
T. S. Eliot

1–Violet Beddington (1876–1962) married SS as his second wife in May 1911. A gifted musician, she had studied singing under Paolo Tosti.

2–VHE wrote in her diary on 20 July: ‘Rather unsatisfactory weekend. Schiffs very fatiguing and irritating to me. T. got on all right.’

3–
Napoleon
, a play by Herbert Trench (1919), favourably reviewed by JMM, A., 11 July.

TS
Houghton

25 July 1919

Asticon, Maine

Dear Mr Eliot:

Your letter of July 9th from 18 Crawford Mansions, London, reached me July 23rd. I suppose I asked in my letter of January 4th the questions to which you refer in your present letter partly because I felt interested in the career of a member of the Eliot clan, and partly because I always feel much interested in an exceptional or peculiar career of a well-trained Harvard graduate, – especially if that career be literary or scientific.

From what you tell me, I should suppose you had been distinctly successful so far in your efforts to procure a livelihood in foreign parts and at the same time win reputation as a writer. Your employment in a bank recalls the cases of Lamb, Grote, and Lubbock.
²
In a bank or a Government Bureau one can work a few hours a day for a livelihood and yet be fresh several hours a day for literary or scientific labors. Your living in London needs no justification. You are quite within your rights in practicing on your belief that living in London is good for you spiritually
and also leads quicker than by any other route to established success in literature.

It is, nevertheless, quite unintelligible to me how you or any other young American scholar can forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere – a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope. I have never lived long in England – about six months in all – but I have never got used to the manners and customs of any class in English society, high, middle, or low. After a stay of two weeks or two months in England it has been delightful for me to escape to either France or America; although I have had English and Scotch friends whom I have greatly admired and loved.

Then, too, I have never been able to understand how any American man of letters can forego the privilege of being of use primarily to Americans of the present and future generations, as Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier were.
³
Literature seems to me highly climatic and national as yet; and will it not be long before it becomes independent of these local influences, and addresses itself to an international mind?

You mention in your letter the name of Henry James. I knew his father well, and his brother William very well; and I had some conversation with Henry at different times during his life. I have a vivid remembrance of a talk with him during his last visit to America. It seemed to me all along that his English residence for so many years contributed neither to the happy development of his art nor to his personal happiness.

I conceive that you have a real claim on my attention and interest, – hence this letter. My last word is that if you wish to speak through your own work to people of the ‘finest New England spirit’ you had better not live much longer in the English atmosphere. The New England spirit has been nurtured in the American atmosphere.  

Sincerely yours
Charles W. Eliot

1–Charles W. Eliot (1834–1926), President of Harvard University, 1869–1909; a third cousin once removed of TSE’s grandfather.

2–The essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was a clerk in the India House; the historian George Grote (1794–1871) worked in his father’s bank; and the astronomer and mathematician Sir John Lubbock (1803–65) became a partner in the family bank.

3–TSE had already dismissed ‘such men as Bryant and Whittier as absolute plebieans’ (‘The Hawthorne Aspect’,
Little Review
, Aug. 1918, 48). Elsewhere he identified Poe, Whitman and Hawthorne as the ‘important’ American writers, adding that ‘the essays of Emerson are already an incumbrance’ (‘American Literature’, A., 25 Apr. 1919, 237).

MS
BL

25 July 1919

18 Crawford Mansions,
Crawford St,
W.1

Dear Mr Schiff,

Thank you for your letter, for the
Little Review
, which I will keep for Pound, and for your book. Of course I have not had time even to look into it yet, but I am looking forward to it with much interest. I want to see at what point if any, it joins the curve of development of
Richard Kurt.
I see in
R. K.
a process of crystallisation in the later part of the book which interests me and which I think may in future lead you further away from or
beyond
your theory of the novel than you think.

I am appreciative of your careful study of ‘Gerontion’ and shall be glad always to hear anything further you may have to say about it. If I have not another poem by the time I will do an article for
A. & L.
[
Art & Letters
] – not on any current book, as I do enough of that for the
Athenaeum.

I should really much prefer it if
you
would write to Rodker yourself. I am only a contributor, you know! and I am sure he would be quite as likely to send something serviceable if you wrote. His address, if you do not know it, is John Rodker, 43 Belsize Park Gardens,
N.W.
3.

But I believe that Aldington would be a better person to acquire, and is a good
prose
writer too. He is more
mature
than Rodker and I expect him to become one of the few to count. His tendency is in the right direction – he really seems to me an important person to have. Richard Aldington’s address is c/o the Authors’ Club, 2Whitehall Court,
S.W.1.
I have an article by Pound for your next number which I will send you.

I do not know who Ludovici
¹
is. What little I have seen of [D. H.] Lawrence lately makes me think him thoroughly
dégringolé
[run down].

However, I must stop now.

With best wishes

Sincerely
T. S. Eliot